In this collection of profiles and essays, Max Salazar, perhaps the most eminent Latin-music historian in the United States, tells the story of the music and the musicians who made it happen.

Shortly after Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, they began moving into an uptown Manhattan neighborhood that would become known as "Spanish Harlem." By 1930, Afro-Cuban music had gained a firm foothold in the city, setting the stage for the mambo, boogaloo, salsa and Latin-jazz scenes that followed. In this collection of profiles and essays, Max Salazar, perhaps the most eminent Latin-music historian in the United States, tells the story of the music and the musicians who made it happen, including Tito Puente, Machito, Tito Rodriguez, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, Hector Lavoe and many others.

Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York begins in 1960s New York and examines in rich detail the playing styles and international influence of important figures in US Latin music. Such innovators as José Fajardo, Johnny Pacheco, George Castro, and Eddy Zervigón dazzled the Palladium ballroom and other Latin music venues in those crucible years. Author Sue Miller focuses on the Cuban flute style in light of its transformations in the US after the 1959 revolution and within the vibrant context of 1960s New York. While much about Latin jazz and salsa has been written, this book focuses on the relatively unexplored New York charangas that were performing during the chachachá and pachanga craze of the early sixties. Indeed, many accounts cut straight from the 1950s and the mambo to the bugalú’s development in the late 1960s with little mention of the chachachá and pachanga’s popularity in the mid-twentieth century. Improvising Sabor addresses not only this lost and ignored history, but contends with issues of race, class, and identity while evaluating differences in style between players from prerevolution Cuban charangas and those of 1960s New York. Through comprehensive explorations and transcriptions of numerous musical examples as well as interviews with and commentary from Latin musicians, Improvising Sabor highlights a specific sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York. The distinctive styles generated by these musicians sparked compelling points of departure and influence.

Joe Conzo and David A. Perez luminously recreate the life of widely acclaimed Afro-Cuban and jazz musician Tito Puente in the biography "Mambo Diablo - My Journey with Tito Puente." The authors chronicle the life of the popular and combative New York Puerto Rican multi talented musician and entertainer who climbed from his obscure and poor environment in East Harlem (El Barrio), New York to international fame and recognition. Countless stories have been written about Tito Puente's percussive musical abilities, but rarely has the talent, intuition, mishaps and controversies been presented in a vivid and personal biography. Joe Conzo was Tito's close friend, confidant and chronicler for nearly 40 years - no one was closer to Tito or knew him better, not even his family. Joe tells the story of a man and his music the way it has never been told. David A. Perez sets down Joe's personal recollections and fits them into the context of the social milieu and revolving world. Hundreds of articles have been written about Puente, and three books Powell, Josephine. Tito Puente - When The Drums are Dreaming, Authorhouse, 2007 (Information re: Tito is based on her conversations with Tito Puente. The book is self-published and chronicles many of his activities on the West Coast. There are many inconsistencies, mis-quotes, and errors of fact.) Loza, Steven. Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music, University of Illinois Press, 1999 (A technical work that is based on interviews with people who knew Tito. The life of Puente is glanced over; the musicians he worked with are almost overlooked. Joe Conzo is among those interviewed.)Payne, Jim. Tito Puente - The King of Latin Music, Hudson Music, 2000. (Is presented as an overview of Tito Puente's music and includes a DVD with footage of Tito discussing his 50-year career. Joe Conzo provided much of the information for this endeavor.) record some of his achievements. None of them touch on the personal life of the man, expose his weaknesses, reveal his intensity for perfection, and describe the musical brilliance in such a delicate and personal way. Joe and David reveal the inner Tito Puente through his music, his musical associations and present a man that is more than a flamboyant percussionist. Tito played piano - and he played it well. Tito played the saxophone and often sat in the sax section of his orchestra. Tito played the vibes and had an incomparable style that was exciting, romantic and jazzy. He composed about 500 tunes, probably more. And, yet in the realm of American jazz historians, writers and critics ignore, brush over and avoid the importance of Tito's music and his contributions. A prime example of this is Ken Burn's television documentary about jazz - he virtually ignores Afro-Cuban music, Afro-Cuban jazz. Joe and David reveal Tito's rightful place in the history of music and give an unbiased, on-the-mark portrait of Puente's complexities like no book before it. Author and journalist Pete Hamill sets the stage for the journey in the preface.

"Danielle Goldman's contribution to the theory and history of improvisation in dance is rich, beautiful and extraordinary. In her careful, rigorously imaginative analysis of the discipline of choreography in real time, Goldman both compels and allows us to become initiates in the mysteries of flight and preparation. She studies the massive volitional resources that one unleashes in giving oneself over to being unleashed. It is customary to say of such a text that it is 'long-awaited' or 'much anticipated'; because of Goldman's work we now know something about the potenza, the kinetic explosion, those terms carry. Reader, get ready to move and be moved." ---Fred Moten, Duke University "In this careful, intelligent, and theoretically rigorous book, Danielle Goldman attends to the 'tight spaces' within which improvised dance explores both its limitations and its capacity to press back against them. While doing this, Goldman also allows herself---and us---to be moved by dance itself. The poignant conclusion, evoking specific moments of embodied elegance, vulnerability, and courage, asks the reader: 'Does it make you feel like dancing?' Whether taken literally or figuratively, I can't imagine any other response to this beautiful book." ---Barbara Browning, New York University "This book will become the single most important reflection on the question of improvisation, a question which has become foundational to dance itself. The achievement of I Want to Be Ready lies not simply in its mastery of the relevant literature within dance, but in its capacity to engage dance in a deep and abiding dialogue with other expressive forms, to think improvisation through myriad sites and a rich vein of cultural diversity, and to join improvisation in dance with its manifestations in life so as to consider what constitutes dance's own politics." ---Randy Martin, Tisch School of Arts at New York University I Want To Be Ready draws on original archival research, careful readings of individual performances, and a thorough knowledge of dance scholarship to offer an understanding of the "freedom" of improvisational dance. While scholars often celebrate the freedom of improvised performances, they are generally focusing on freedom from formal constraints. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Houston Baker, among others, Danielle Goldman argues that this negative idea of freedom elides improvisation's greatest power. Far from representing an escape from the necessities of genre, gender, class, and race, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever shifting landscape of constraints. This work will appeal to those interested in dance history and criticism and also interdisciplinary audiences in the fields of American and cultural studies. Danielle Goldman is Assistant Professor of Dance at The New School and a professional dancer in New York City, where she recently has danced for DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill. Cover art: Still from Ghostcatching, 1999, by Bill T. Jones, Paul Kaiser, and Shelley Eshkar. Image courtesy of Kaiser/Eshkar.

From the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon comes a vibrant picture of mid-20th-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converge to create an original American sound.

An illustrated, in-depth examintion of the avant-garde and politically radical Latino art of San Francisco's Mission District In The Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the "Mission School" by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the Latin Quarter in the 1940s and the subsequent cultivation of the Beat counterculture in the 1950s, demonstrating how these decades laid the groundwork for the artistic and political renaissance that followed. Using oral histories, visual culture, and archival research, she analyzes the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, Latino involvement in the avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements of the 1960s, the community mural movement of the 1970s, the transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s. Through these different historical frames, Cordova links the creation of Latino art with a flowering of Latino politics.